Misplaced on Planet Nessus
by SturyMC
Summary: Cayde is stranded on Nessus. Tensions with his Ghost are at an all time high. To make matters worse he's gained the company of two mysterious companions: A chicken and a docile Vex Harpy.


He was holding a chicken when I met him. A chicken in one hand and a hand cannon in the other. It kept pecking at his horn so he held it like a baby with a poopy diaper. The gun echoed through the cave system as he shot at me once or twice, but the chicken knocked the gun straight out of his hand. He scrambled to pick it up but the chicken got loose so then he was chasing after that. By the time he got his affairs in order he figured I was harmless. He holstered his weapon and took a good look at me. "Definitely Vex…" he muttered. He clicked his fingers to the left and right of me, then used a flashlight to look into my eye "…look, I don't have a clue, you got anything?" A little bot flashed up beside him. "Judging by the fixtures mounted on the wings I might estimate that it's a recent manipulation of-"  
"Okay that's enough." He shoved the bot back into his pocket. "That's why I never let him out. Talks too much. Well you seem nicer than present company, can you walk? -Float, I guess?" I hovered about an inch. "Keep doing that." The chicken kept a beady eye on me from then on.  
"See much better than that stupid cave, didn't I tell 'ya?" The chicken clucked in agreement. They weren't wrong. I hadn't realised but that Cave was cold and dark, and lonely. I had no memory of long I had been there. This was much better. It was a lush crimson forest with emerald wind rustling through the leaves. But in the phosphorous green atmosphere were offensive cubic chunks, carved from mountains. It gave the entire planet an unhuman, disturbing edge. "Here's the game plan: I crashed my ship. So we're trying to rondevu with an illegal mining operation which, if anyone asks, I didn't know about until just today. Everyone okay with that?" This time the chicken didn't cluck. "Fantastic."

We trucked through a swampy valley. As the valley narrowed the two gigantic blocks on either side of us seemed to be plotting to squash us. I was always a few steps ahead of Cayde. I could glide over the mud, but his progress wading through the swamp was agonising. And he kept complaining about ruining his lucky boots. But the chicken enjoyed the slow cruise on Cayde's shoulders. At one point the chicken spontaneously perched itself on a branch, and refused to come down. Cayde begged on his knees for it to get down, a stunt which put him neck high in mud. Eventually he just shot the branch in half. Splattering his face in swamp water, but the chicken landed neatly back on his shoulder. Then we started through the swamp again, but after the gunshot the valley felt quieter.

Cayde stopped suddenly. "Did anyone feel that?" A second later Cayde started shooting wildly into the lagoon. "Ghost, wake up." The bot from earlier popper out of his pocket. "Oh, what's that? You need my help now?"  
"You know, I can do this by myself."  
"WAIT I NEED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING-"

Cayde shoved the bot back into his pocket. "You, come here!" He was looking at me but I was frozen. Something was moving in the water behind him. "Closer, come on." A languid tail squirmed out of the mud. An enormous, fatty heap of flesh followed behind it. I ran, as fast as I could. "You piece of junk, come back here!" Cayde came tumbling after me. The chicken saw it next. Wriggling and sliding through the thick muddy crust. The chicken jumped ship, fluttering from Cayde's shoulder to mine. "Guys! I thought we were a team!" Then Cayde saw it. He let out a scream and struggled through the sludge. But it was no use.

Then it erupted into the sky, spewing dirt, mud and rocks in all directions. The chicken and I watched helplessly. It wasn't bound to our laws of physics. The creature had no sense of momentum or propulsion. It whipped and coiled like a parasite. I analysed this memory later, checking for bugs in memory function. I can only say that it moved through time alone. It fought against space. Struggling to keep up with the planet's obit around the sun, the sun's trajectory in the galaxy and indeed the galaxy's expansion across the universe. It was an abomination beyond the universe.

I didn't even realise that Cayde had straddled me. He was on my shoulders and shouted "Yah!" I snapped out of it. We strode across swamp as the worm writhed in space. Smashing into left cube then the right. Sending boulders crashing down in all directions. I narrowly avoided a hunk by making a sharp pivot. This sent Cayde straight back into the mud, face first. He stayed under the mud for a moment too long. Then he exploded into the fresh air for a breath. "Close one." He said. Immediately, a second boulder crushed him dead. I didn't notice the raining boulders anymore, or the cosmic beast howling above us. Poor guy, I thought. The chicken pecked at my shoulder to remind me to keep moving. So we resumed our gallop through the swamp. The beast crashed back into the valley, splitting mud as it raced towards us. Its mouth agape, preparing to swallow us whole. We could see its teeth made of muscle and mucus, you could even peer into the digestive system which promised slobbery and sensitive death.

A sudden crack of golden lightening burst from the clouds. A perfect statue had animated behind us, he was wielding a pistol of pure energy. Three shots fired into the beast's open mouth, ricocheting into the deep and strange oesophagus. The beast flew into wall. Scraping its face against the stone, I looked dead into its milky white eye. It looked like it hadn't slept in eons. Against the will of gravity, the creature continued to meander against the wall until it smeared itself into the distant horizon. And then it was gone, leaving only a trail of milk in mud.

The man's golden aura vanished. It was Cayde. "Did you miss me?" He said as he hopped on me. He snapped his neck back into place. "That boulder did a number, nothing a friendly ghost can't fix" We were nearly clear of the swamp, and we were starting to climb for high land. The bot appeared "…you're welcome, by the way." Cayde shoved him back into his pocket.  
"That's why I like you two so much, nice and quiet."

A few hours past and no one said anything. We were trailing across a cube covered in a red field of wheat. The planet stretched out below us. The geography was partly geometric chunks with lakes of electric milk, partly lush crimson forest, shared between a green mist. Cayde had committed to straddling me like a horse, so without footsteps there was only wind. An eerie dead silence with an expansive view. It felt like a dream. That would explain why I was in a cave without moving or thinking. That would explain the worm.

Dusk fell to night, so Cayde made camp in a strange formation. A half converted mountain. At the cross section, you could see minerals hidden under the mountains mantle. What machine could carve planets like this? I thought. Cayde said we must be getting close as he set up a fire. "Do you sleep?…well maybe just keep an eye on Mr. Clucky" Cayde said as he settled down next to the roaring red wheat. Which burnt for hours. For the rest of the night I followed Clucky around. We found a lush alcove with a natural spring for Cluck. Vines had nearly hidden it entirely, and there was some wheat for him to eat.

Clucky made an impromptu nest between on my head. When the sun rose over the velvet planet I returned to camp. But I stumbled across Cayde and his bot quietly arguing.  
"Listen pal, you better watch what you say about Mr. Clucky" Cayde said.  
"How else do you explain a chicken on a lifeless planet?" Cayde noticed us in the corner of his eye, and finished the conversation. "Oh hi guys! Get any sleep? That's great. We're about to get moving so make sure you have everything."

Cayde didn't straddled me anymore but Mr. Clucky was at home. I kept noticing Cayde staring at us when he thought I wasn't looking. And he didn't keep his ghost in his pocket anymore. They wouldn't let us out of their sight, so we would always cross cubes first. Which required a small jump from one elevated wheat field to another. Call it jungle fever if you like. We found another swamp, but a log connected to the other side. Again they insisted we travel across it first. But the tension broke when we spotted the mining camp in the distance.

We came up against an Iron Gate, and it took the four of us to push it open. Violet vines strangled it shut, so it took everyone's effort to get it open. Except Mr. Clucky who just watched and clucked. It opened suddenly once the vines snapped. The camp was empty, overrun with local flora. Prefabricated buildings, built to last a few months, had started to collapse. One building had been crushed by a tree trunk. Cayde run up the biggest structure, laughing to himself "Classic camouflage technique! Come on in guys, they've probably got coffee!" he said to a robot, a chicken, and myself. He lightly knocked on the door, but door was so feeble that it fell off its hinges and landed on Cayde's toe. "MOTHER OF GOD!" Cayde cried. Clucky clucked as Cayde wailed. "You shut up Mr. Clucky!" Meanwhile the ghost strode past them into the building. "Where did you even come from? How did you get here?! WHO sent you!" "CLUCK! CLUCK! CLUCK! CLUCK! CLUCK!" Just then the lights flashed on. The mining camp churned into operation. "I got the power working." The ghost hovered above the feeble door.

We journeyed into the base of operation. It looked like a war room. A large table in the centre of the room, with a detailed map of local area atop. Several seats were knocked over as if there was a struggle. And an espresso machine destroyed. "Just when my day couldn't get any worse!" Cayde cried. The bot scanned the machine "Plasma burns. There was a gunfight here."  
"Man. Poor guys. Hope they got out okay. Hey, is there a working shower around here?"  
"Down the corridor to the left."  
"Great. I have mud in places." Cayde whistled down the hall while the rest of us explored. Clucky was pecking at coffee beans which I knew was a bad idea, and the ghost analysed the map in the centre of the room. He started talking but I was distracted. "It's mapping the natural cave formations. Maybe the miners escaped into the tunnels." Then he saw me transfixed "Oh no." I found a mirror. I didn't have legs, but I guess I already knew that. I was metal. I had a single large sensor as an eye. I floated with three fins, looking like a robot starfish. I am a robot. "You're a robot, just like me and Cayde." I thrashed at the mirror shattering it into sharp glitter. Cayde ran into the run with a towel around his waist and shot his hand cannon two inches from my fin. "Crap! Sorry I thought you were a Vex. Well I mean you are a Vex – technically, uh I'm going to stop talking now." I floated outside to get some air. I hovered on top the gate and watched the sunset. A bright pointy star pierced through clouds, the brazen red sky stretched to murky green. The sun was twice as large as earth's, searing the sky. Cayde hoped up beside me. We watched the sun dip below the horizon. "I, uh, wasn't always a robot. I had a family, actually. I don't remember any of it but had this photo in my pocket when I woke up." It was Cayde without the horn and skin instead of metal. A boy and younger girl, and a beautiful wife. "Sometimes people change, I just hope I was a good dad."

We didn't sleep that night. The bot insisted that we search the cave system immediately. He was clearly looking for something. The tight stone walls had a gentle buzz that seemed to get louder the deeper we travelled. Luminous bulbs were drilled into support beams to guide us through the system. They produced barely enough light to find the next one. The tunnels funnelled into an enormous stomach with limestone walls and fresh water. Clucky took a pecks at the running river. There weren't any miner, but strange symbols on the wall. The cave was so big that it petered into darkness before you could see the end. Cayde and his ghost followed the stream until it abruptly hit a stone wall. "The water's still flowing. There's 'gotta be something behind this wall." Cayde said as he searched the wall for a lever or a button or something. His bot was giving close inspection to the symbols splattered across the limestone. "Carbon dating tells me these are recent. Maybe a few years, maybe less. But these ones are much older - Cayde could you stop messing around." A rock snatched under Cayde's boot. Hidden gear started churning. Everyone looked at Cayde, who himself looked helpless. Then the river stopped flowing neatly under the wall. It started to pool. Then the tunnels to the stomach slammed shut. The water began rising. It reached shin level alarmingly fast. "Could you please just listen to me for once in your life?"  
"Just shut up and lemme' think."  
"Right here. This symbol here warns about a trap."  
"Unless it says anything about disarming it, I don't wanna' hear it." Cayde frantically started feeling for innocuous rocks. "Secret button, hidden lever. Clucky I don't want to hear it right now." Clucky was floating now, and clucking relentlessly. "Cayde. There's a stone marked with this symbol, apply pressure three times and then-" The water stopped, then started to deflate. "Never mind I figured it out by myself. Old pirate trick." The tunnel doors cranked open again, as well as another, hidden door. Inside was a bright light. "Oh look! A new thing!" Cayde pranced past the speechless ghost.

It was a laboratory. It was old, using golden era tech, but it clearly wasn't government funded, it had looked like a shanty town. It wasn't insulated and the ceilings were just the cave walls with lights drilled in. The floor was installed to let the river flow beneath it, and cool the computers systems. The room was decked out with monitors and reports, and in the centre was a strange device. Two glass tubes, big enough to fit an entire person, had strange crystals installed above each. The crystals were hardwired into the monitors. "Hey I've seen this before. At a museum. It's an early prototype teleporter. Can only move you a meter or so, from one chamber to the next. Those crystals are pure software. You reckon you can rig this thing to get us off world ghost?" The ghost grumbled and resigned himself to tweaking the device "Just don't touch anything, Cayde." Clucky was fluttering his wings in an especially violent affair. He found the dead miners. Cayde navigated through the computer terminals to inspect the scene. "Yep, those were our guys. Looks like a standoff." Blood shot across the floor in all directions. Cayde noticed I was looking at a machine "Woah, hey, you might not want to look at that." Cayde said to me. It was an exact copy of myself, a Vex, except torn to pieces by bullets. "Strange, Vex normally travel in swarms, and what's that smell?" Cages of dead chickens were rotting in the far side of the laboratory. "JESUS! Ghost, you nearly got the thing working?" The ghost just grunted. Cayde nearly knocked over a large vat trying to get away from the smell. "Holy cow! This is a hive parasite! How's it not starved?" Lumbering and twisting in on itself. It lived inside the vat, awakened by Cayde. It was a ghoulish shade of white, with no skin at all, just muscles convulsing and relaxing. "That is disgusting." I couldn't take my sensor of it. It was the monster from the swamp, I was sure of it. But it was different. Smaller, and it was missing the milky eyes and the agonised movement. I was the only one who noticed the second empty vat. "Got it." The ghost said as hit the final switch.

The ghost had wired himself into the machine to boost the machine's signal. The crystals buzzed, emitting more light than the bulbs. "Shotgun first!" Cayde hopped into the pod and slammed the go button. "Cayde! I'm not ready." Ghost said as the device charged.  
"You don't have a nose! You don't know how stinky it is."  
"SHUT UP. Just make sure you give the tower these coordinates. Don't forget them: 4A 3C 5C" The crystals were vibrating a deafening tone. "Say again!"  
"4A 3C 5C!"  
"One more time, sorry it's really loud in here!"  
"4A! 3C! 5C!" The crystals were spinning so fast that they now just looked glowing orbs. They were bright, blinding. Mr. Clucky was hiding behind me. "Ok! Got it! I think." A final flash of light before the entire station short circuited.

"4A 3C 7E! Wait, HOLD ON, maybe it was 9E?"  
"Cayde! I told you, not to forget!"  
"Great, it didn't work, I'm stuck here with Sir. Nonstop and Team Mute." The generators kicked in. One by one the bulbs rebooted. The lights hit us like a punch. My sensor took a moment to recalibrate. The ghost was still hard wired into the teleporter. And Cayde was still standing in the glass tube. "Hey it did work! I moved like 3 feet, where you were standing!" Said Cayde, in a distinctly synthesised voice. "Hey that's me!" Cayde said to himself still in the tube.

"Wait a second…" Cayde's knees collapsed. "You idiot!" He nudged the tube open and crawled out. "It's not a teleporter. It's a temporal cognition-shifter. Give me a sec I need to get these feet working." Cayde's body slowly picked himself off the ground and took a few wobbly steps towards the ghost's body. Then punched him. "You sure know how to throw a punch, handsome. Woah, hold on a second-" The ghost gets shoved Cayde in his pocket.

"That felt good. Okay, so Cayde and I have swapped bodies." Ghost took a step towards us and we took a step back. "Right. Still a bit scared, 'gotcha. Cayde screwed up and thought that this was a teleporter. It's actually a cognitive, um, something or other - sorry, god he is really dumb." Mr. Clucky clucked in confusion, but I was following. "Anyway, I'll try to fix this." Ghost walked stiffly to the controls and picked up two wires and pressed them against each other. Nothing happened. "I have no idea what I'm doing here, Cayde is too stupid." Cayde popped up. "Looks like someone could use the help of pocket-sized, super-computer-Cayde!"  
"No." Ghost shoved Cayde back in his pocket. He obviously noticed that we disapproved so he quickly said "I just don't like being told what to do, is all."

After about three hours Clucky and I were getting pretty bored. The Ghost had dismantled the machine and was getting very bitey. "Could you please not cluck while I'm thinking." He snapped. I decided to take Mr. Clucky for a walk and give the Ghost some space. We spent some time in the limestone stomach, I read the hieroglyphs which confirmed my theory on the golden age tech. It told the story of a rogue Ghost scientist who set up a private research laboratory on Nessus. He wanted to avoid government regulations, the equivalent of being in international waters on earth. He finished a prototype, before being wiped out by the invading Vex forces. The miners had highlighted the next passage. It detailed the Vex patrol patterns, how the network sweeps the surface of the planet once a month, while monitoring the subterranean system within a 24 hour window. The next patrol was due in fifteen minutes.

The Ghost wouldn't listen. "Listen, little light, I don't have time to play. I've got work to do." I knocked a malfunctioning monitor onto the floor, smashing it. "I'm not going to respond to this tantrum. I want you to go into that cave and think about what you've done." Time was ticking, and he was getting nowhere without Cayde. I waited for the Ghost to back to work, then floated over to the dead miners. Mr. Clucky was asleep on his nest, on my head, so I had to be very careful not to wake him. I wedged one of their pistols into my fin, spearing the trigger guard, and slowly raising it to eye level. Floating is quieter then walking, so I managed to get a meter behind the Ghost before Mr. Clucky caught the smell of the fat juicy Hive Worm. Mr. Clucky shattered the vat in a symphony of clucking, flapping and pecking. The ghost whipped around head first into my pistol, I blew his head to pieces.

Cayde popped out of the pocket. "Thank you! I have never met a man more stubborn." I pushed Cayde to the glyphs, and he went along with it because he thought I was cheering his return. "I know pal, I'm glad to be back too" I pointed to glyph and he scanned it. A beam of information draining the wall. "Scanning feels weird. Different to how I would have thought, more of a sucking sensation." Then he froze. "So we've only got 5 minutes?" I nodded.

Cayde resurrected the Ghost in storm of light and energy. It looked very uncomfortable. But obviously the Ghost was in more pain, screaming as Cayde clumsily put his face back together. "My god! That hurts." The ghost said grabbing at Cayde. "Wait! Don't put me in back!" The ghost loosened his grip of Cayde. "I'm sorry I keep you in my pocket. It sucks. I won't do it anymore. But I need to tell you something." Cayde squirms free and starts to talk in a whisper. "In two minutes. Vex will be marching through this system. Hundreds, maybe thousands. I've got a plan. But I need you to trust me." The ghost started to load his hand cannon. "Cayde, with my brains and your wits, you're unstoppable. What do we do?"

Cayde jacked himself into the computer. The machine exploded into life. Numbers start running through the monitor at lightning speed. It was loud. Too loud. It echoed through the caves. Distant squeals bounce from the cave's deep uncharted bowels. Accompanied by an advancing drone. A speckled hum. Which soon became a thousand tiny footsteps. The crystals started faintly glowing. Cayde asked "How much time we got?"

"Not enough," the Ghost replied, "I'll be back." Then he disappeared into the damp cave, quickly eaten by the darkness outside the bulbs' light. We didn't hear anything for anything except the relentless march for minutes on end. Then a booming crack of three of gunshots. Followed by a dark rumble, like an upset volcano. Then nothing. The march had stopped. "What happened? Is my body okay?" Cayde asked. He couldn't turn around, the wires stopped him.

"CLUCK." Said Mr. Clucky. A moment later the Ghost emerged from the darkness covered in scratches and dirt. "I collapsed the tunnel. Should hold them back from a hot minute." He was counting his last bullets while he talked. The crystals started to spin, and glowed hot. "Well I only need another minute or two." Said Cayde. A muffled punch echoed from the stomach. The droning resumed, angry and fierce and determined. "Can you go any quicker?" The ghost said. Cayde ramped the crystals speed, they started to boil like molten lava. "Here goes nothing." We could see those Vex eyes pierce through the darkness, one by one a sea of red beads appeared inside the mouldy stomach. The orbs were glowing so bright that they illuminated the army. Hundreds of them meandering through a limestone river, towards crystal's blinding light.

The crystals burst. Emitting a deafening sinewave. We were plunged back into silence. Before the lights rebooted, I was whipped away. Charging through the slimy army of dank, cold robots. Their red sensors were starting to reboot. A harsh and sudden clank snapped them awake. Someone activated the pirate trap. They opened fire on each other. Cayde had supercharged the body swapper. All the Vex had switched with their proximity partner. The confusion had discombobulated their threat systems. Beams of hot plasma lit the stomach up like a messy dance club. The cave's walls were unstable as stray bullets chipped at support beams. The water began to rise but we snuck into the surface tunnel before the trap was sprung. We ran through the nervous tunnel, threatening to crush us with every step. We could hear the water thrashing and stone crunching behind us.

Carried underneath Cayde's arm, I burst back into the base of operations. Daylight glowed over us like a warm hug. "Okay regroup, everyone feeling themselves?" Cayde said looking at himself in the broken mirror. "You feel yourself Mr. Clucky?" I clucked. Then it struck me. I remember it all.

We were miner's food. They farmed us on Nessus. We were the only animal that could eat crimson[S1] wheat. We would roam inside the camp like pets. Once we they discovered the abandoned laboratory everything changed. We graduated to lab rats. Too scared to hop in themselves, they shoved us in the chamber and hit the go switch. Aggressive chicks turned docile, and the reverse. They took it a step further. They detained a vex unit, shoved it in one chamber, and me in the other. Nothing happened. They tried again. This time upped the power. The crystal burnt so bright that it blew the power board. I woke up still in the chamber, everyone else was pointing guns at each other. The lab was erupting. They were shouting, terrified. All of them, even the vex unit. A stray bullet was let loose on accident, and it all went to hell. They clipped the crystal. The plasma supercharged the device for round two. Next thing I remember, Cayde has a gun pointed at me. Holding a Vex in sheep's clothing, well, a chicken's clothing.

The Vex unit was playing along. Pretending nothing had changed. But it was gaining intelligence, and I was quickly losing it. My mind had been supercharged by a Vex machine but now was falling back to farm animal. I didn't have much time. I struggled out of Cayde's arms. Fluttered up to table and made for the Vex Unit. They could see it now. The milky docile eye was now beaming a violent red. I could only think simple thoughts. But I managed to remember that the Vex unit was my prey. A sharp peck popped the Vex's eye, getting juice everywhere. We were picked up by a guardian, scouting the planet for Cayde. She picked up the disturbance created by the crystal's sinewave.

I live at the farm now, back on earth. The air feels clean and fresh, and the greenery is much nicer than that forsaken, red planet. A woman named Tyga keeps us fed, the food isn't as good as crimson wheat but the company is nice. There's a chicken coup but we're free to roam. Everyone now and again Cayde and the Ghost visit, with a bundle of crimson wheat – the good stuff. Cayde's a vegetarian now, which makes me feel much more comfortable around him. They fill me in on their adventures and keep me posted on the Vex situation. They seem to be getting along better now. I can't really remember what it was like to be a Vex now. The memories are fuzzy and distant, like remembering a book. I just hope I was a good.


End file.
